5 thoughts on “links for 2008-07-11”

  1. The author of the linked article seems to believe that because economists are not right one hundred percent of the time, what they are doing is entirely useless. Needless to say, there’s a hole in that logic large enough to drive a fleet of 747’s through.

  2. Economics might be the only area of research, where the researchers actually have a say in determining the activity of their research subject, through influence on policymaking.
    It would be like a physicist formulating a model for particle movement, and than making particle movement work according to it.

    So for them not to be able to predict major economic trends is pretty pathetic, and shows how “scientific” economics is.

  3. Well, here’s a question: does economics do better than just Making Things Up? Economists don’t have to be right one hundred percent of the time to be valuable; they just have to do better than blind guessing.

  4. The linked article was pretty poor. At least a couple of the examples given were spurious or misinterpreted. For example, rating agencies aren’t (and weren’t) the be-all and end-all arbiters of credit risk. Smart and diligent investors do their homework. Unfortunately, some people got lazy.

    Secondly, Greenspan himself is hardly apolitical. Anyway, when a policy maker says that it’s impossible to “anticipate the next financial malfunction”, he generally means that it’s difficult to tell which point of weakness will fail. That doesn’t mean that the next blow up is unknown to everyone. That there was a credit bubble was well-known, that there would be a liquidity squeeze when the bubble blew was well-known too. It was the intensities that were hard to quantify, and the people who were successful at this aren’t going to blow their own trumpet.

    Sure there have been failures in regulation, and attempts to circumvent the rules, but there will always be such. In fact, there’s something called Goodhart’s Law that predicts it. Economics may not be always scientific, but rather than bashing the field for this, it would be nice to praise the people who have tried to make it more so.

  5. @1:
    If those 747’s were as unreliable, they’d have to drive literally. Flying would be out of the question.

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